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The issue of protecting and propagating traditional music has been paid extraordinary attention by Western musicians since the nineteenth century. In 1998, Yo-yo Ma established the Silk Road Project, a nonprofit foundation devoted to the living arts of people from the various cultures found on the historical Silk Road. In this project, many pieces of tradition music from these cultures have been transformed in new ways, allowing them to be performed and propagated among the diverse audiences of today’s multicultural context. This study aims to examine how Ambush from Ten Sides, a masterpiece of Chinese traditional music, was arranged and presented by the Silk Road Ensemble. My work will focus primarily on two issues: 1) What methods did the Silk Road Ensemble use to adapt this piece of traditional music; and 2) How do today’s audiences from both the West and the East receive and understand the adaptation?
In our present context, I believe that preserving traditional music in its original form will not satisfy audiences. Innovating traditional practice without losing its original essence is the approach that I advocate. Through analyzing the music and interviewing the audience members from both China and North America, I will show that Yo-yo Ma’s Silk Road Project has been successful in doing this, and, as a result has contributed to the promotion of Chinese traditional music in North America. The innovative aspects of the adaptation of Ambush from Ten Sides by the Silk Road Project are intended to facilitate Western musical acceptation of this piece. However, as opposed to most Western composers in the twentieth-century who used Chinese musical materials to create works that serve as vehicles for self-expression, the Silk Road Project attempts to capture and transmit the cultural artefact (Ambush from Ten Sides) from one culture to another. To achieve this cultural transmission, the arrangers adopted three strategies in preparing the adaptation of Ambush from Ten Sides: 1) the breaking of tradition, 2) the mixing of elements from different cultures and 3) the weakening of a sense of the exotic (from the perspective of North American audiences).